After Eminem finished his secret performance at this year’s Oscars, the headlines pouring into the social sphere were painfully predictable.

“The Best Baffled Reactions to Eminem’s Surprise Oscars 2020 Performance,” said Esquire.

“Oscars 2020: Eminem’s ‘Lose Yourself’ performance confused everyone,” wrote Vox.

“Oscars 2020: Fans left confused by Eminem’s surprise performance,” copied NME.

Nothing could be more clear: mass media, with its unending possibilities in the age of limitless resources, still relies on the same old tired dogshit tricks to tell its side of the story.

Whatever gets the clicks. 

The performance was bland, choppy and overall pretty non-newsworthy. Sure it was Eminem, but it didn’t tip any scales by way of historical prominence. Not like when Three 6 Mafia blasted onto the 2006 set with its southern-styled, Oscar winning “It’s Hard Out Here For A Pimp” — talk about shocking! All the Karens in the audience most definitely spoke with the manager after that one.

But the headline “Some Rapper Did Something That Was Kind of Boring” just doesn’t have the same ring to it.

Yet as Detroit’s rap god sauntered off the stage and the show cut to commercials, it took less than ten minutes for a few dozen writers around the world to carve an energetic “confused celebrity” narrative into the mix — a completely misguided and false account. Eminem won an award for that iconic song in 2003. It’s a song that tailed numerically in a large list of other songs being presented on stage that made movies just that much better. It was obvious why he was there.

And for whatever reason, the reactions in the audience were blown way out of context by the media as we later came to find out after a few more PR twists hit Twitter. A disgusted Idina Menzel! A pissed off Billie Eilish! Martin Scorsese fell asleep!

Jeeze … Idina Menzel’s face always looks like that. She paid a lot of money for it. Leave her alone.

Billie Eilish was 10 months old when the track was released. Eminem is like angry dad rap to her. Feel ancient yet?

And Martin Scorsese’s vampire blood is like 4,300 years old. You’d be tired too.

But it’s what we have to deal with as pop culture consumers: one story hits the wires, and then another refutes it. Soon enough, there are so many sides to any one event it becomes far too burdensome and rather pointless for normal people with half a life to figure out the truth. It’s why 2020 America has trust issues.

The 2020 Oscars brought in its worst TV ratings in the show’s history. Unless you watched (which many didn’t), you’d have to rely solely on headlines to know what happened. With such inaccuracy, that’s a scary thought.

Social media is on overdrive with this kind of insanity. And the poor underpaid writers who have to embed Twitter feeds and Reddit gifs all day are exactly the problem. Did you know most large media corporations expect 4-5 articles per day from their writers? No wonder why they’re always so inaccurate and full of txpos.

Pro tip: a broom can stand on its own whenever you want it to. How the fuck did NASA screw that one up so badly?

"This is another social media hoax that exemplifies how quickly pseudoscience and false claims can go viral," NASA said in a statement. 

… Oh shit, so NASA had no part in it. Thanks random Twitter user @mikaiylaaaaa who easily conned millions of Americans to the contrary.

Mark Twain actually did say: “If you don’t read the newspaper, you’re uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you’re misinformed.” 

What actions are you going to take to not be either of those?